Road to Law School

Long post ahead!

Why lawyering?

Why not?

That's how it started. A question asked by one of my mentors one day over lunch at u-mIx.

"Have you ever thought about becoming a lawyer?"

Before that, I hadn't.

I had thought about becoming a veterinarian, a rock star, a pro athlete, a writer and a journalist.

All those things got shut down when I realized I couldn't bear to see animals suffer, I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, I'm about as athletic as JaMarcus Russell (without the paycheck), it's taking forever to write a novel and as a reporter...well, it wasn't for me.

So, I decided to try this law thing. Made sense to everyone. Where else did Eagleheart stand a chance at making a career out of arguing with people?

I started with the pre-law academy headed by Dr. Betancourt (UH Law Center '94) at UT-Brownsville in the summer of '09. For those of you considering law school or law, this is a great place to start. It's a month-long course in the summer, divided as follows:

First two weeks:

A single LSAT preptest at the beginning, then there's talks with lawyers, law students who are in town for the summer and judges spread out around the two weeks along with visits to the courthouses. Then there's mock law school classes taught by Dr. Betancourt, homework assigned, et cetera.

Second two weeks:

The University has a deal with Kaplan, who provides LSAT tutoring and books for the next two weeks under the guidance of one of their tutors. There's not as much law school talk here as there is LSAT talk, which...you need to get into law school.

Overall, a great course, and you come out of it either wanting to keep on a law school path or thinking that you will never ever have anything to do with it ever again.

Does it work? Yes, if you wanted to go to law school.

11 people took the course, 5 ended up taking the LSAT afterwards. Of those five, 2 got into UT Austin, 1 got into South Texas College of Law for the Fall, and one of them (me), would eventually get accepted into South Texas College of Law for the Spring.

At this point you're thinking, wait, if you took the LSAT afterwards, how comes you didn't get in for Fall or even Spring 2010?

Well, there's a story to that.

I thought I was a big shot. I did. I had survived an AP test in high school and had been doing alright at my normal tests. Not to mention I was an awesome sports editor (and would eventually get the awards to prove it), I was about to graduate and needed to party. I studied, yeah, but I didn't study as hard as I should have...and I paid the price.

I had even visited South Texas College of Law in November of 2009 and SMU in February of 2010 and I totally saw myself walking through those halls as a law student.

I received my first rejection notice, from Baylor, in February. I was sad, but I said, I'm not going to mope. My applications for my top choices were still out, I had the opportunity to spend a month in Spain and audit some classes at the University of Granada and at the same time study European laws, which are very...different from ours. Better in some senses, worse in others.

Then I got back and the rejections started coming in. UH Law Center and St. Mary's sent me denial letters the day I got back. Life still had to go on, though, and I took a job as a volunteer paralegal with South Texas ProBar. I'm thrilled that I had the chance to work here, and it was a challenge...some of the stuff I had to listen to and work on, as well as the places I had to work at wasn't that easy to handle. But I managed, and it was then that I really knew that law was for me.

Epiphanies aside, throughout my time there I learned a lot, but I was also getting more and more rejections. South Texas College of Law was the fourth school to deny me admission for the spring semester, and it was a big blow because I had my heart and mind set on going to law school in Houston. I kept up the work, and then...the last two rejections came in.

At that point, I realized I was not going to get into law school in the fall.

To be continued...